Assesses how cinematic biographies of key figures reflect and shape what it means to be British.

Rule, Britannia! surveys the British biopic, a genre crucial to understanding how national cinema engages with the collective experience and values of its intended audience. Offering a provocative take on an aspect of filmmaking with profound cultural significance, the volume focuses on how screen biographies of prominent figu...(Read More)

Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced the urban crisis.

The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary ...(Read More)

Explores a growing number of films and filmmakers that challenge the strict boundaries between belief and unbelief.

For some time now, thinkers across the humanities and social sciences have increasingly called into question the once-dominant view of the relationship between modernity and secularism, prompting some to speak of a “postsecular turn.” Until now, film studies has largely been silent about this developme...(Read More)

The first book-length study of Trecartin’s artistic genealogy, evolving aesthetics, radical approach to digital and Internet culture, and impact on contemporary art, film, and media.

Hailed as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties,” American artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin has received numerous accolades for his kaleidoscopic, multilayered movies and multimedia installa...(Read More)

How films of the 1960s and early 1970s framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, and individual psychological problems as social ones.

Rx Hollywood investigates how therapy surfaced in the themes, representations, and narrative strategies of a changing film industry. In the 1960s and early 1970s, American cinema was struggling to address adult audiences who were increasingly demanding films that confr...(Read More)

Examines an all too often neglected period of postwar British cinema and popular culture.

Ripping England! investigates a fertile moment for British satire—the period between 1947 and 1953, which produced the films Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Lavender Hill Mob, as well as the seminal radio program The Goon Show. Against the postwar background of fading empire,...(Read More)

Identifies a new genre—misdirection films—and explains its appeal to contemporary producers and audiences.

Are You Watching Closely? is the first book to explore the recent spate of “misdirection films,” a previously unidentified Hollywood genre characterized by narratives that inspire viewers to reinterpret them retrospectively. Since 1990, Hollywood has backed more of these films than ever bef...(Read More)

Examines movie romance in light of our emotional bond to the actors and characters on screen.

Gestures of Love considers the viewer’s enchantment with charismatic actors in film as the starting point for closely analyzing the performance of love in movies. Written with a thoughtful adoration for the actors who move us, Steven Rybin examines several of cinema’s most beloved on-screen movie couples, including ...(Read More)

Passionate Detachments investigates the rise of graphic violence in American films of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the popular aesthetics and critical responses this violence inspired. Amy Rust examines four technologies adopted by commercial American cinema after the fall of the Hollywood Production Code: multiple-camera montage, squibs (small explo...(Read More)

How does cinema culture imagine one of its favorite figures, the rebel? The reputation of the American director Nicholas Ray provides a particularly notable example. Most famous for Rebel Without a Cause, Ray has since been canonized as a “rebel auteur” and celebrated for seeking a personal vision and signature style un...(Read More)